CHAPTER 5
• How do groups affect how we behave?
• Why can “who you know” be as important as
“what you know”?
• In what ways have large business organizations
changed in recent decades?
• SOCIAL GROUPS
– The clusters of people with whom we interact in
our daily lives
• FORMAL ORGANIZATIONS
– Huge corporations and other bureaucracies
SOCIAL GROUPS
• Two or more people who identify with one
another
• Groups contain people with shared
experiences, loyalties, and interests
• Not every collection of individuals forms a
group
• The right circumstances can turn a crowd into a
group
Primary and Secondary Groups
• Two types of social groups
– PRIMARY GROUP
• A small social group whose members share
personal and lasting relationships
– SECONDARY GROUP
• A large and impersonal social group whose
members pursue a specific goal or activity
• Primary group relationships spend a great deal
of time together
• These personal and tightly integrated groups
are the among the first experienced in life
• Members of primary groups think of their
group as an end in itself rather than as a means
to other ends
• Members view each other as unique and
irreplaceable
• Secondary relationships involve weak
emotional ties and little personal
knowledge of one another
• Include many more people than primary
groups
• Passage of time can transform a group from
secondary to primary
• Members do not think of themselves as
“we”
• Primary groups display a personal
orientation
• Secondary groups have a goal orientation
• Primary group members define each other
according to who they are in terms of family
ties or personal qualities
• Secondary groups look to one another for
what they are
– What they can do for each other
• Traits define the two groups in ideal terms
• Most real groups contain elements of both
Group Leadership
• Important element of group dynamics is
leadership
• TWO LEADERSHIP ROLES
– Instrumental Leadership
– Expressive Leadership
• Instrumental Leadership
– Group leadership that focuses on the
completion of tasks
• Make plans
• Give orders
• Get things done
• Expressive Leadership
– Group leadership that focuses on the group’s
well-being
• Less of an interest in achieving goals
• Focus on promoting the well-being of members
• Minimize tension and conflict among members
• Instrumental leaders usually have formal,
secondary relationships with other members
• Expressive leaders build more personal, primary
ties
• Successful instrumental leaders enjoy more
respect from members
• Expressive leaders receive more personal
affection
• THREE LEADERSHIP STYLES
– Authoritarian Leadership
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•
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•
•
Focuses on instrumental concerns
Takes personal charge of decision making
Demands that group members obey orders
Win little affection from the group
Is appreciated in a crisis
– Democratic Leadership
•
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More expressive
Includes everyone in the decision-making process
Less successful in a crisis situation
Draw on the ideas of all members to develop
creative solutions to problems
– Laissez-faire Leadership
• Allows group to function on its own
• “Laissez-faire” – French, meaning “leave it alone”
• Least effective in promoting group goals
Group Conformity
• Groups influence the behavior of their
members
– Promoting conformity
• Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram
– Even strangers can encourage group conformity
• Asch’s Research
– Found that many of us are willing to
compromise our own judgment to avoid the
discomfort of being different, even from
people we don’t know
• Milgram’s Research
– People are likely to follow the directions not
only of legitimate authority figures but also of
groups of ordinary individuals, even when it
means harming another person
• Irving L. Janis’s “Groupthink”
– GROUPTHINK
• The tendency of group members to conform,
resulting in a narrow view of some issue
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Pearl Harbor, WWII
Vietnam War
Bay of Pigs, Cuba
Iraq, 2003
Reference Groups
• A social group that serves as a point of
reference in making evaluations and
decisions
– Used to assess our own attitudes and behavior
– We also use groups we do not belong to for
reference
– Conforming to groups we do not belong is a
strategy to win acceptance
• Samuel A. Stouffer’s Research
– We do not make judgments about ourselves in
isolation
– We do not compare ourselves with just anyone
– In absolute terms, we form a subjective sense
of our well-being by looking at ourselves
relative to specific reference groups
In-Groups and Out-Groups
• IN-GROUP
– A social group toward which a member feels
respect and loyalty
• OUT-GROUP
– A social group toward which a person feels a
sense of competition or opposition
• Based on the idea that we have valued
traits they lack
• Tensions between groups sharpen the group’s
boundaries and give people a clearer social
identity
• Members of in-groups hold overly positive
views of themselves and unfairly negative views
of various out-groups
• Powerful in-group can define others as a lowerstatus out-group
• Many white people view people of color as an
out-group
• In terms of in-groups and out-groups,
explain what happens when people who
may not like each other discover they have
a common enemy.
Group Size
• Group size plays a crucial role in how group
members interact
• THE DYAD
– A social group with two members
– Social interaction is more intense than in larger
groups
– Unstable, if either member withdraws, the group
collapses
• THE TRIAD
– A social group with three members
• More stable than a dyad
• As groups grow beyond three people, they become
more stable and capable of withstanding the loss of
one or more members
• Reduces intense interaction
• Based less on personal attachments and more on
formal rules and regulations
Social Diversity: Race, Class, and
Gender
• Race, ethnicity, class, and gender, play a part
in group dynamics
• Three ways in which social diversity
influences intergroup contact:
– Large groups turn inward
– Heterogeneous groups turn outward
– Physical boundaries create social boundaries
• LARGE GROUPS TURN INWARD
– The larger a group, the more likely its members
are to concentrate relationships among
themselves
– Efforts to promote social diversity may have
the unintended effect of promoting separatism
• HETEROGENEOUS GROUPS TURN
OUTWARD
– The more socially diverse a group is, the more
likely its members are to interact with
outsiders
• PHYSICAL BOUNDARIES CREATE SOCIAL
BOUNDARIES
– To the extent that a social group is physically
segregated from others, its members are less
likely to interact with other people
Networks
• A web of weak social ties
• A “social web” expanding outward
– Reaching great distances and including large
numbers of people
• Some come close to being groups
• More commonly includes people we know
of or who know of us but with whom we
interact rarely
• Network ties may be weak, but they can be
a powerful resource
• Based on people’s colleges, clubs,
neighborhoods, political parties, and
personal interests
• “Privileged” networks are a valuable source
of “social capital”
• Gender shapes networks
– Women include more relatives (and more
women)
– Men include more co-workers (and more men)
– Women’s ties are not as powerful as typical
“old boy” networks
– As gender equality increases, male and female
networks are becoming more alike
FORMAL ORGANIZATIONS
• Large secondary groups organized to achieve
their goals efficiently
• Differ in their impersonality and their formally
planned atmosphere
• To carry out most of the tasks of organizing the
300 million members of U.S. society, reliance is
on formal organizations
Types of Formal Organizations
• Three types of formal organizations
• Distinguished by the reasons people participate
in them
– Utilitarian Organizations
– Normative Organizations
– Coercive Organizations
• UTILITARIAN ORGANIZATIONS
– Just about everyone who works for income
belongs to this type of organization
– Pays people for their efforts
– Joining is usually a matter of individual choice
– Most people must join to make a living
• NORMATIVE ORGANIZATIONS
– Sometimes called voluntary organizations
– People join to pursue some goal they think is
morally worthwhile
– People in the U.S. and other high income
countries are most likely to join
• COERCIVE ORGANIZATIONS
– Involuntary memberships
– People are forced to join as a form of
punishment or treatment
– Have special physical features
– Isolate people for a period of time to change
their attitudes and behaviors
Origins of Formal Organizations
• Date back thousands of years
• Early organizations had two limitations
– Lacked technology
– Pre-industrial societies they were trying to rule had
traditional cultures
• TRADITION
– Values and beliefs passed from generation to
generation
• Tradition makes a society conservative
– It limits an organization’s efficiency and ability to
change
• RATIONALITY
– A way of thinking that emphasizes deliberate,
matter-of-fact calculation of the most efficient
way to accomplish a particular task
• RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
– The historical change from tradition to rationality
as the main mode of human thought
Characteristics of Bureaucracy
• BUREAUCRACY
– An organizational model rationally designed to
perform tasks efficiently
– Official regularly create and revise policy to
increase efficiency
• Six key elements of ideal bureaucratic
organizations
– Specialization
• Assigns individuals to highly specialized jobs
– Hierarchy of Offices
• Arrange workers in vertical ranking
– Rules and Regulations
• Rationally enacted rules and regulations guide
operation
– Technical Competence
• Officials have the technical competence to carry out
duties
• Typically hire new members according to set
standards and monitors performance
– Impersonality
• Puts rules ahead of personal whim
• Both clients and workers are treated the same
– Formal, Written Communications
• Heart of bureaucracy is not the people but paperwork
• Depend on formal, written memos and reports,
which accumulate in vast files
• Bureaucracies carefully hires workers and
limits the unpredictable effects personal
taste and opinion
Organizational Environment
• Factors outside an organization that affect its
operations
– FACTORS
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Technology
Economic and political trends
Current events
Available workforce
Other organizations
• TECHNOLOGY
– Shapes modern organizations
• ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL TRENDS
– All organizations are helped or hurt by periodic
economic growth or recession
– Most industries also face competition from
abroad as well as changes in law
• CURRENT EVENTS
– Significant effect on organizations that are far
away
• POPULATION PATTERNS
– Average age, typical level of education, social
diversity, and size of a local community
• Determines the available workforce and market for
products or services
• OTHER ORGANIZATIONS
– Contributes to the organizational environment
THE INFORMAL SIDE OF
BUREAUCRACY
• In real-life organizations, humans are creative
enough to resist bureaucratic regulation
• Informality may cut corners but it also
provides the flexibility necessary for change
• Informality comes from the varying
personalities of organizational leaders
• Qualities and quirks of individuals can have an
effect on organizational success or failure
• Leaders sometimes seek to benefit personally
through abuse of organizational power
• Communication is another source of
organizational informality
• E-mail has allowed even the lowest-ranking
employee to bypass supervisors
PROBLEMS OF BUREAUCRACY
• Can dehumanize and manipulate
• Some say it poses a threat to political
democracy
• BUREAUCRATIC ALIENATION
– Potential to dehumanize the people it serves
– Impersonality that fosters efficiency also keeps
officials and clients from responding to each
other’s unique needs
– Formal organizations create alienation
• Reduces human beings to “small cogs in a ceaselessly
moving mechanism”
• Designed to benefit humanity but people might end
up serving formal organizations
– BUREAUCRATIC INEFFICIENCY AND RITUALISM
• Bureaucratic Inefficiency
– The failure of a formal organization to carry out the work it exists
to perform
– “Red Tape” – important work does not get done
• Bureaucratic Ritualism
– A focus on rules and regulations to the point of interfering with an
organization’s goals
– Rules and regulations should be a means to and end, not an end
in themselves
• BUREAUCRATIC INERTIA
– The tendency of bureaucratic organizations to
perpetuate themselves
• OLIGARCHY
– The rule of the many by the few
– “Iron law of oligarchy”
• Pyramid shape of bureaucracy places a few leaders in
charge of the resources of the entire organization
• Bureaucracy helps distance officials from the
public
THE EVOLUTION OF FORMAL
ORGANIZATIONS
• Problems of bureaucracy stem from two
organizational traits
– Hierarchy
– Rigidity
• Bureaucracy is a top-down system
– Rules and regulations are made at the top
– Guide every part of people’s work down the chain
of command
Scientific Management
• The application of scientific principles to the
operation of a business or other organization
• Involves three steps:
– Managers observe job performance, identify
operations involved, and measure the time needed
for each
– Managers analyze data and discover ways to
improve job efficiency
– Management provides guidance and incentives to
increase efficiency
• Principles of scientific management suggest
that decision-making power should rest with
the owners and executives
• Formal organizations now face the challenges
of:
– Race and gender
– Rising foreign competition
– Changing nature of work itself
The First Challenge: Race and
Gender
• In the 1960’s, critics claimed big businesses
engaged in unfair hiring practices
– Routinely excluded women and other minorities
from positions of power
• PATTERNS OF PRIVILEGE AND EXCLUSION
– Excluding women and minorities ignores the talents of
more than half the population
– Open organization encourages leaders to seek out
ideas of all employees
• THE “FEMALE” ADVANTAGE
– Patterns which help companies strive to be more
flexible and democratic
• Women have greater communication skills
• Women are more flexible leaders
• Women emphasize the interconnectedness of all
organizational operations
The Second Challenge: The Japanese
Work Organization
• Japanese organizations reflect that nation’s strong
collective spirit
• Value cooperation
• Hired new workers in groups
– Everyone had same salary and responsibilities
– Fostered a sense of loyalty
– Trained workers in all phases of operations
– Involved workers in “quality circles”
– Companies played a large role in the lives of workers
The Third Challenge: The
Changing Nature of Work
• U.S. economy moved from industrial to
postindustrial production
– Using electronic technology to create or process
information
• Differences:
– Creative freedom
– Competitive work teams
– A flatter organization
– Greater flexibility
– Postindustrial economy created two different
types of work:
• Highly skilled creative work
• Low-skilled service work
The “McDonaldization” of
Society
• A symbol of U.S. culture
• “McDonaldized”
– Organizational principles are coming to dominate
our entire society
– Aspects of life are modeled on the restaurant
chain
• McDonaldization: Three Principles
– Efficiency
– Uniformity
– Control
• Principles limits human creativity, choice, and
freedom
• “The ultimate irrationality of McDonaldization is
that people could lose control over the system
and it would come to control us.”
THE FUTURE OF ORGANIZATIONS:
OPPOSING TRENDS
• Postindustrial economy created more routine
service jobs
• “McJobs” offer few benefits that today’s highly
skilled workers enjoy
• Global competition attract creative employees
but costs are cut by eliminating many routine
jobs
• Some people are better off than others